MANHATTAN CRUDE : in an age (and a war) consumed with Purity, the dying Dr Dawson's gift of crowd-sourced 'impure' natural penicillin was not just a global lifesaver. It was also a window into a new way of looking at the world.

Monday, November 30, 2015

Does the Canadian Liberal Party push for AV really mean a move to "Adultery" Voting ?

It better not, because to adapt a phrase from long long ago, 'the Trudeau government has no place in the bedrooms of the national ballot box'.

A voter should always have the right to vote for the party or candidate of their first choice.

But a supposed reform of Canada's electoral system, moving to the Rank Ballot and the AV (Adultery Voting) scheme, as favoured by the Trudeau Liberals, would effectively remove that right - virtually forcing voters to cheat on their favourite party and to see their second, third, four or fifth choice take top place instead.

Instead of simply having false majorities created in the governing party's large total seat count versus their smaller total vote count, this adultery voting would ensure new but totally false majorities are created for the ultimate winners in about two thirds of Canada's MP districts.

The system is designed to favour centrist parties in three party systems split left right and centre.

Thursday, November 19, 2015

The Double V campaign, mounted by a relatively small number of black journalists for a relatively short time during WWII, is generally considered a failure at the time ---- despite its subsequent fame.

But Henry Dawson's contemporary effort to see abundant natural penicillin produced for all was much more successful, then and now, in changing hearts towards a much inclusive view of humanity and nature.

Though very little attention was ever shone upon it - back then and even today....

I can't say I was exactly wrong the last eight years to emphasize
how different from the much more famous (atomic) Manhattan Project was HenryDawson's own tiny wartime Manhattan project, involving a little of his homegrown penicillin and a handful of SBE patients.

But I do now think I got it far more right the first time I test-drove the idea of 'comparing and contrasting' the penicillin and atomic Manhattan Projects, back about nine years ago.

For my point then was - my point now is - that both the atomic and penicillin projects started off as very small fry indeed and only became huge when the Allied governments (atomic) or the world's public (penicillin) adopted them as their own.

During the inter-war period and for long time afterwards, medical researchers who wanted to fit inside (and more importantly, rise inside) their profession's norms focussed exclusively on studying virulent microbes and treating acute illnesses.

But right from the start, at two of the world's top medical research centres (Rockefeller Hospital and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital), Henry Dawson defied those norms, taking a wide 'inclusive' view of research possibilities that took him well outside the medical Pale.

And ten billion and counting of us, since 1940, have had better lives, because he chose to do so.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Part I : the SBEs

Dr Henry Dawson's (non-publicized) decision to quietly inject a truly tiny amount of his homegrown version of an impure and untested new medicine, into two no-account patients in a near empty hospital, surely qualifies as one of the clearest possible examples of a journalistic non-story.

Particularly when set against the really big news story on that same day, October 16 1940 : America's first ever peacetime draft registration.

But yet the sum of an event's symbolic impact can be far larger than its small physical presence - that historical first ever injection of a life-saving antibiotic still echoes down to us today.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Dr Henry Dawson had never given a single solitary thought to making natural penicillin in industrial pilot plant quantities or of curing the incurable SBE with the same -- until he had had more than his fill of the overheard (and highly irritable) table talk of his colleagues, in the six critical months between May and October 1940.

Most people consider the tense days and nights of the Blitz to be the low point of the war.

But military historians point to the period between the fall of Singapore and the fall of Tobruk as the lowest point in the war, when the huge British empire was joined by the huge Russian and American empires but the larger Allies still suffered reversal after reversal from the smaller Axis.

I think the actual moral low point was the period between the collapse of the British French front lines in May 1940 and October 1940, when it became apparent to all that the Germans had "postponed" their sea invasion of the UK.

New Canadian PM Justin Trudeau wants to defeat the persistent calls that 'every vote in Canada finds a voice in Parliament' by quickly moving to a rank ballot system (aka AV) that will only benefit centrist parties like his Liberals.

This is fully consist with the Liberals' belief that they are Canada's natural governing party and any means to that end are morally justified.

Saturday, November 7, 2015

Canada talks a talk that it is inclusive --- but its federal Cabinet don't walk the inclusive walk .

In having ministers who are also representative of some large and historically underrepresented minorities, the new Trudeau cabinet is actually lessadvanced than the earlier and supposedly 'WASP gated community' Harper cabinet.

Historians of medicine and science, to the small extent that they care at all about it, have never had any problem deciding what in the name of God Dr Henry Dawson was up to, back in the Fall of 1940 seventy five years ago.

But I think they got it completely wrong. And this blog is the result of my doubts - the forum for expressing all my doubts --- and proving them up.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Not if we then deliberately set up the rules of our electoral system to ensure that generally only well to do candidates from parties representing the well to do voters win virtually all the seats in the resulting legislature.

Monday, November 2, 2015

Halifax, Canada says it wants to follow many other municipal government worldwide and let every permanent resident - not just Canadian citizens - vote in municipal elections.

Stifle your praise.

Because while most people in Halifax don't vote and only a tiny portion of the pitiful portion who do bother to vote actually see their vote represented by a voice at the municipal council chamber, the non-voters at least have a legitimate excuse.

This planet needs, STAT ! , a loosely interconnected international citizens' movement to promote inclusive values, above all in the voting systems in all the old line climate-denying nations still excluding most voters from having a voice in government.

In King George III's day, the era of the American Revolution, only 3% of Britons (and no colonists) could vote for the Parliament that taxed them and the 97% sought to remind George III that they "wanted in".

Shades of today's Canadians reminding Justin Trudeau that "the 2/3 that didn't vote for him wants In !"

About Me

I write, urgently, about our world's painfully too-slow transition into a new era, the Age of Entanglement. Ironically - and typically - this supposed new era actually represents a modified return to the world's oldest philosophy.
For the ancients almost universally saw all life as thoroughly entangled, saw all lifeforms as dining together at a common table - open commensality on a global scale.
Today’s science demonstrates that for us to survive on Earth, humans must sustain the lifeforms that in turn sustain us . So, for example, for us to kill the ocean’s upper reaches will soon remove the very oxygen we need to live.
And economics confirms we can not afford to replace the tens of trillions of dollars of free goods that Nature effortlessly provides humanity annually : there is no “Mars Plan B”.